The Switch from Spotify: foobar2000 + the many players out there

This blog post is intended for nerds but if you're not a nerd, you're also free to join some nerds in the circle! I am no professional at explaining anything under the sun, but we're going to try our best and make something sound sensible.

When the pandemic started to die down around 2021, I learnt about and decided to switch to the long standing music player foobar2000 after learning about it through discord. I got the 32-bit version as it's all I saw, and immediately I got to work and started using the shit out of the player.

I would switch players often, as I always did. I had used AIMP and sometimes WinAmp the year prior, having used those all my life. I did also find myself interested in the windows bundled app windows media player 12 (as included with windows 7 and up, now unfortunately replaced with whatever wmp11 is) for all of those windows addicts and fruitiger aero people, but as cool as the player was, it wasn't practical. So I had to turn elsewhere.

First, let's tackle the elephant in the room, and the one everybody's going to get Nostalgic over. I hate to ruin everybody's fun but I do have a few things to say. Windows Media Player 12, first bundled with Windows 7, and continued to be bundled with Windows up until late versions of Windows 11, when it was replaced.
We'll drift into positives first: Simplicity. WMP12 made it very simple to handle audio, it was my first exposure to auto-scalling media library features and even my first exposure to genre tags and file tagging as a whole. I had lots of fun messing with it, learning the ins and outs, even messing around with the feature that would fix album art for songs that had it missing. It was a blast.

And then I grew up. I realized how much easier it was to fight with the player as I got older, how features begun to break and how I was no longer enjoying the player, and moreso fighting with it for control. Album art fetching broke, I started to fight with the tag system, I became unsatisfied. And then I left. Remembering how I would sometimes use AIMP on the side, I hopped ships.

AIMP was all fun, but it got boring fast. It had a nice UI and the plugins were awesome! The wallpapers would be nice additions too, especially the older 2009 wallpapers. But it always felt there was something missing sometimes, it played and did what it was meant to, but something left me wanting more.

WinAmp seemed to fill that hole for a while longer. Even though I used it later than I did AIMP, around ~2020, it had felt like a more old-school version of AIMP, which is probably where the UI design choices from AIMP came from. It also had the iconic Milkdrop visualizer and whatever else was popular with people, something I enjoyed heavily. However when looking between AIMP and WinAmp, they were almost the same thing to me. On top of that, Spotify looked a little nicer, and WinAmp, it felt off. Spotify was a different beast, which we'll have to get to in a minute.

Then it kind of crashed down. Apparently WinAmp had not been the same since it's glory days, the last widely favored release being 5.666. But I was using a version later than that. So the real question was, what now?

I tried more players, tried returning to childhood favorites. Tried SoundCloud and found it's selection kind of mediocre, only good for a few songs at best. I became briefly obsessed with obscure players, sometimes going to bizzare lengths to try new setups. But nothing was entirely satisfying. So instead, I just stuck with what I knew and waited for life to throw a bone. I transitioned from YouTube downloading my music to using ThePirateBay torrents and took my loss.

We are going to briefly skip ahead, to 2023. That was the day I learnt about WinAmp's downfall, and their transition to v6, which was distasteful and very boring to me. Plus they had briefly tried to go into NFTs apparently, trying to sell of the OG WinAmp UI as an NFT. That was dumb and I didn't get any of it.
But looming over it was like a hand from the heavens, coming to bring me a refresher, something new. Sure, it was pretty much WinAmp, but it was something better. Something that was separated from the original company.
WACUP.

So then I tried WACUP. I recognized all the same things, but at the time, I was so distant from WinAmp, that everything was new enough to enjoy. It added more things to WinAmp, it had more things to enjoy, more optimizations and the like. And being run by who I think was one of the original WinAmp developers, it was a win. But once again, comparing to AIMP, they felt very similar in many aspects, and once again, I felt myself wanting more.

And now we have to talk about big brother. Spotify. Let's go back to 2018.

I turned to Spotify during the summer of that year, somewhere around 2 years after first being obsessed with WMP12. The convenience appealed to me, and while I wouldn't get to enjoy some of the exclusives I loved when I was in the AIMP/WMP12 era, but at the time it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. I skipped out on my favorites that were limited to the Japan editions and whatnot, but it was a sacrifice I wanted to make for convenience.

And so I did. For about 2 more years, I stuck with Spotify, only occasionally switching away from Spotify when I started to grow a hate for it's Local Files feature just to use a music player. And I was happy for the most part, kind of just taking hit after hit from Spotify over the years. I put up with the video ads, I put up with the audio ads, I gave in to the ads just to have convenience in my life, in a time where I didn't know that there was better options. I only briefly knew the history of platforms like Limewire then, I didn't know what I was doing. So I turned to the popular option. Hoping for some kind of help.

And over the years, it was finally unlocked in me. For two years, I took hit after hit, continuing to stick with Spotify. When using Discord, I kept using Spotify for rich presence, not knowing about the other options once again. My option was set in stone, cold as ice. I never turned back permanently, Spotify has locked me in.

That's what it had looked like. Slowly, the plugs would be pulled. I would finally turn to a music player and start to enjoy that more than Spotify. And coincidentally, all the right plugs would also be pulled on many features. The support for the original December 2013-2014 clients that Spotify used to have would break, it's functionality would eventually die out. Many songs would be taken down over the years, including various songs that I listened to often, and when those were out of the picture, the rope was put very thin. Spotify would also kill some of it's API which would also break functionalities in some players outside of Spotify, preventing them from streaming audio from Spotify even if you had Premium. And now more recently, Lyrics were killed. I had enough. I left Spotify, and while I would return a few more times to give it a second chance, it wouldn't always do the trick. I still wanted more.

I would try a few more players, and even briefly become attached to the similar player MusicBee. MusicBee would end up also being briefly good, but then I would find I wanted more features, once again. MB was great but it didn't have entirely what I was looking for. So then I set eyes on foobar2000, my next choice. The round killer.

At first, foobar2000 was kind of just any other player for me. I would use it on and off between ~2020 and 2023, mainly going between foobar2000 and MusicBee. I would miss the features of the player I wasn't using, make the hop, then feel it all again. I missed foobar2000's simplicity. I missed MusicBee's discord plugin. I missed foobar2000's component ecosystem. I missed MusicBee's rating feature. It would go on and on. It would be like a nonstop battle for about three years.

And that brings me to around September 2023. After some extensive modding of foobar2000, I would eventually get the player in a pretty good state. And by that point, it was too late for me to switch. I was so invested in the things you could do with foobar2000, I was just hooked. You could change anything. You could add new buttons next to the pause and skip and backwards buttons, you could add new functionality. I played around with everything, from adding viewable lyrics to the player, to AIMP bookmarking, A-B loop, Discord Rich Presence, waveform minibar, YouTube playback... The list goes on.

The idea of components would come and go, I would grow very satisfied. I would change my layout often, trying to get new ideas, and I would expand my taste by researching and adding features from other players I liked. I eventually also added artwork to the playlist view, a change I stuck with since. Overall, my listening experience was just better.

I would also learn about ReplayGain this way, as well as the various formats outside of MP3. FLAC was finally known to me. I got to experiment with OGG and learn about the OPUS format. I also finally got a very basic idea about how music rips were made, even learning to make my own, learning to keep a local collection of music that would never be pulled as long as I kept it untampered as long as possible. It was like a personal haven.

And that brings us to today.

For the past year, I have been using the 64-bit version of foobar2000, mainly for the performance benefits. It's new, futureproof, I was sold on the illusion that it would just perform better, and for a while I had no requirements that required me to go back, at least for a while.

That was until now, obviously. I was growing rather bored of the current hacky, very rough solution for my problem. It was not only very rough and buggy, I had broken folders in folders on my own accord and I just wanted it to be hassle free. So I decided to pick myself up and turned to the 32-bit side again, having become interested in Spider Monkey Panel, which was an updated version of a foobar2000 component that allowed adding JS to the player. Without a second thought, I kicked the door down and walked right into the land this morning, to play around and find new adventures.

I had originally planned to return to my original solution, however after hearing the great things about SMPanel, I gave it a try. And I was pleasantly amazed, after some setup and some hammering of my own. It had in fact worked how I hoped it would, and more! It was not perfect obviously, but it was less fragile than my original implementation. Bit by bit, I got it configured to my needs and I had finally made it home to the player that I wanted so much.

The only thing that made me downgrade from x64 to x32 is the current state of foobar2000 components. Currently, the world has been split into two. There are the legacy 32-bit components that everybody else is desperately clinged onto, and the 64-bit lands, that is future-proof in case the technology industry pulls the plug. Somehow we are still alive, but the thing is, many legacy components won't update to also support x64. Some components go back to the early 2010s and even the late 2000s! Sure, that makes a good history lesson, and that admittedly turns us into a history channel, but the thing is not everybody wants history. Some people just want to update to x64 thinking they need it, or thinking x32 doesn't work. So then what do we do?

We just have to wait. SMP won't update to x64 for a while, that would require SMP v2 to be finished, and we got at least a few more years. So I guess I'm going to be stuck here, on x32. Where everybody's happy and nostalgic.

At least it's better than not having it at all, right?